Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] You're listening to a live recording from Westside church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. Amen. You can have your seats. Thank you.
[00:00:37] I think it is really beautiful the way that when the disciples asked Jesus, how should we pray? Teach us to pray, that Jesus responded in a way, not, that said, here's some ideas to get you started, but he simply said, this is actually how you should pray. And in a few short verses that we just read, he laid out not a formula, but an approach to how we engage in our prayer life, our relationship, our conversation with the Father.
[00:01:10] And so for these past few weeks, we've been overlaying Jesus instructions for how we should pray over what was the formative story for the jewish people of which Jesus was a part.
[00:01:22] The story, the narrative that shaped their identity as a people, that set their culture, that set their laws, that created the entire religious society that they exist in. All of that started in the story of the Exodus, where the people of Israel came out of slavery in the land of Egypt and wandered in the desert for 40 years before eventually stepping into the promised land after crossing over the Jordan river. And what happened in those desert years as the leader, Moses went up to meet with God on Mount Sinai, and he received the law and he received the ten commandments. All of that narrative. And that story was the bedrock of the culture for the people that Jesus was a part of. And so it's from that understanding and that as their origin story that Jesus is teaching in the sermon on the Mount, when he teaches the disciples how to pray, it is calling back to and reflecting the struggles and the successes and the miracles and the failures, all that was experienced in the book of Exodus and the. The story of the people coming into the promised land. And so we've been spending some time overlaying our way to pray that was been given to us by Jesus over the story of the Exodus, to understand how those ancient stories can apply to us today. And so we're gonna continue that in the few moments we have together.
[00:02:49] So Moses goes up on the mountain as they arrive at this mountain called Sinai. If you remember from a few weeks ago, Sinai is also the place where, long before Moses went head to head with Pharaoh. He was tending sheep on the mountain of Sinai, and that's where he came across the burning bush. So he comes back to the burning bush out in the desert with the people now around him, and he goes up on the mountain to meet with God. And God speaks to him. And Moses is copying down the words he hears from God. And famously, he writes ten commandments, right?
[00:03:23] And the first two of these I want to read word for word out of Exodus, chapter 20, because it's almost odd how much time, word by word, that God gives to these first two commandments compared to the rest. Exodus, chapter 20, verse two. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall make no for yourself. Excuse me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing children for the sin of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
[00:04:10] So right off the bat of the ten Commandments, the first two commandments he gives are all about not worshiping or making idols. And he spends a ton of real estate in the text to make the point of how serious he is about not going back to idol worship. And so we get a sense that for those people, God's intent for them was very clear that you must at all costs, avoid the worship of idols. Okay? This is a big, huge deal. Now, for us, our experience with idols might be fully contained just in the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the raiders of the lost Ark. Right? Where he swaps the idol for the bag of sand. That's as bad. As much as I know about idols. And yet, for the people in ancient times, idols were everywhere. Everywhere.
[00:05:04] And specifically in their day, each piece of land, each geographical location would have had a local idol that went along with it. So if you're at a river, that river has a God with an idol. If you are in a certain tribe, that tribe in the land that they live on has a certain God and idol that goes along with it. And if you were passing through someone else's territory, you might have some idols with you. But they were just the visiting idols because there was somebody who was in charge of that piece of land.
[00:05:37] So for the people that understood that kind of thinking around worship and deity and how they encountered the divine Yahweh, the God of Israel, shows up to Moses in the burning bush and says, I'm resetting all this. No idols, no graven images. And Moses would have said, how is that going to work, right? If we don't have an idol that goes along with a piece of land, how in the world are the people going to worship you? And God is saying, listen, I'm above all that. I'm in charge of all the land. And here to prove it, he comes to Pharaoh. And there's this great showdown that we talked about a few weeks ago where all these plagues are showing the people of Israel and the people of Egypt, that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is actually greater than all the local gods. So this is the background, and it's in this understanding that God, in the first of his two great commandments, says, no more idols.
[00:06:34] No more looking for a created thing to satisfy your needs as a people or as individuals, because I'm going to be your God.
[00:06:43] And everywhere you go, I'm actually going to go with you. No idol required.
[00:06:50] So this is what God sets up as a new understanding of how we're going to relate to the God of Israel and what we understand.
[00:07:00] And you could ask any recovering addict that idols, those things that we pour our affection and attention and our allegiance to, oftentimes will turn around and they will actually, even though we owned them in the beginning, they will actually own us. Right?
[00:07:19] And so Moses and God are telling the people, listen, if you continue to worship the idols that you worshiped in Egypt, the slavery you experienced there will follow you into the next season.
[00:07:31] The way you were enslaved in Egypt, that's going to follow you into the promised land. Unless right now, you make a commitment that you won't worship lesser gods and idols.
[00:07:42] And I've heard it said, and I think this is really good, that God knew. It's easier to take the people out of Egypt than it is to get the Egypt out of the people.
[00:07:51] That's the hard thing, is to break the worship of lesser things. If you're here and you're saying, Evan, what in the world does this have to do with me? I don't worship idols. I don't set up little graven images in my window sills. What are you talking about? Well, as one author said it, if we think of our soul as a house, there are idols set up in every room that oftentimes we find ourselves not worshiping at the altar of a formed idol, but falling into the worship of many lesser gods and idols in the society we live in. In fact, there's a big old church getting built on the north side of town, probably the biggest church in town.
[00:08:37] It's Costco.
[00:08:41] This thing's huge. Have you seen this? Have you guys driven by this? I didn't even know there was that much land. They've just.
[00:08:48] It's incredible. Our daughter, we were driving on the new overpass, and out of nowhere, she looks around, all the new concrete and asphalt, she goes, it looks like California.
[00:09:01] We don't like bad talk Californians or anything, but she's associated all this building with something negative from California.
[00:09:10] And it's something. I mean, the scope of this new Costco, it dwarfs the size of our original Costco on the east side, right? And it's funny, I think there is a way that we have to exist right, in the society we are in. But consumerism, honestly, is at the front end of those things that vie for our attention and affection, right?
[00:09:35] And if you're sitting here and thinking, oh, no, we are planning hot dogs, were on the menu for lunch today at Costco, and now he's saying, it's an idol. What do we do? Okay, you can go eat your hot dog. All right. But we have to understand that there are many isms, consumerism being one of them, that are vying for our sense of what we have security in what we look to for our salvation. And you might not have some kind of religious experience at Costco, although some of you probably do. I know you and those of you that do it. You're the evangelist, by the way, for Costco. Because you tell me all the time, I got this great deal. It was amazing. I get it. All right.
[00:10:18] But you may not feel like, well, this is a religious experience, and yet, what do we put our hope in? Oftentimes, it is in the stuff we can acquire, or the wealth that we can accumulate, or the experiences that we can achieve or the pleasure that we can attain. And all these things come to promise us something that we have a lack of in our own souls.
[00:10:40] Very much like in ancient times, long before there was grand scale commercialism, there was this idea that if you give something of worship and allegiance and affection and attention to a God, that. That God is going to respond and give you what you need for the good life.
[00:10:59] So if you need your crops to succeed, well, here. Here's a sacrifice here. We're going to give something to this God of the crops, and the God of the crops is going to respond in kind. And it's going to be this thing where we knew what we're getting into. We're gonna give something, and we're gonna get something from these gods in return.
[00:11:18] And then Yahweh comes in and he says, that has been your arrangement with all these local gods and idols. But here's a new way that I'm gonna be your God and all of your trust and all of your affection and all of your worship, instead of being scattered among all the different ways that you need to get along in life, all of that worship is gonna come to me, and I'm going to care for you as a father cares for a child.
[00:11:45] And it's this resetting of affection and allegiance and worship that is the heart of what God was setting up his people to be all the way back to the desert.
[00:11:56] And if you know the story through the Old Testament, you realize that the people failed at every turn to do this.
[00:12:04] At every turn, they are turning back to creating idols and worshiping them. At every turn, they are placing their trust not in the God who brought them out of Egypt, but in the lesser gods who they go to for security and identity.
[00:12:20] Those gods who they believe are going to give them what they need for prosperity and pleasure and fertility and power.
[00:12:28] And by the way, oftentimes the things that these idols offer us are in their proper place. Good things, right?
[00:12:35] A $5.99 rotisserie chicken. That is a good thing.
[00:12:40] Yeah. That is so cheap.
[00:12:43] Costco is single handedly pushing back against inflation. Thank you. Costco. Right.
[00:12:48] But no, these are good things that are offered. And especially when you look at the ancient people, what they are pursuing is not things that are bad in of themselves, but when they lose their proper place and become the thing in which we place our trust and our hope, then they become idols.
[00:13:08] And slowly but surely, those idols fail to satisfy us, disappoint us, and take control of us.
[00:13:18] And so God knows all this, and he's saying, listen, my people are going to be set apart a different way, a different kind of worship, a different kind of allegiance.
[00:13:27] So Moses is up on the mountain. He receives these ten commandments, and then God walks him through how worship is going to work for this new nation.
[00:13:36] And in Exodus 25, he lays out this plan that the sanctuary, the tent where God was going to meet with his people, what would eventually become the tabernacle and then the temple, that he would dwell with them in that place. And it says in Exodus 25 eight, and let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst.
[00:13:55] And the design of this was to have all the twelve tribes of Israel lined out in a giant rectangle around what would be at the center of the camp, which was the tent where God would meet with his people.
[00:14:08] Well, Moses is up on the mountain for so long that the people are complaining. They're growing impatient.
[00:14:17] They've come out of Egypt. They've gotten out of slavery, but now they're in the desert. And if you've camped for more than a couple weeks at a time, you realize how that's not as pleasant. Egypt would have been more comfortable for them. And so these thoughts are rolling around in their heads and thinking, and we don't even have a leader right now because Moses has gone up on the mount. We don't know if he's coming back.
[00:14:36] And so they go to Aaron, the high priest, who's the brother of Moses. And they say, listen, we're actually not satisfied with this arrangement, this God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this I am character. It doesn't seem like he's actually meeting our needs, because here we are in the desert, and we're waiting, and we don't know what the future holds. And so we need something more than what God is giving us.
[00:14:58] And so Aaron, he complies. Exodus 32. So Aaron said, take the gold rings from the ears of your wives and sons and daughters and bring them to me. And all the people took the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. And then Aaron took the gold, melted it down, and molded it into the shape of a calf, which would have been a very familiar egyptian style idolat. And when the people saw it, they exclaimed, o Israel, these are the gods who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
[00:15:30] And Aaron saw how excited the people were.
[00:15:34] Can you catch that?
[00:15:37] Idolatry gives the people what they want. Note that.
[00:15:41] So he builds an altar in front of the calf, and then he announced, tomorrow will be a festival. To who?
[00:15:49] To the Lord. What?
[00:15:52] They didn't teach me that in Sunday school.
[00:15:56] I always thought that Aaron built this calf out of gold. And the people said, enough with God. Enough with this Yahweh God character that Moses talked about. We're abandoning that to worship this idol. But what we actually find in the text is that Aaron said, listen, I've created an idol that really goes really well with Yahweh.
[00:16:16] The idol will complement so nicely all the pieces of God that you feel like you're not getting from him. This idol can do those things for you. And he begins to mix the worship of God and this golden calf. And it's in the mixing of our worship oftentimes, that we tread on the most dangerous ground.
[00:16:36] It's not that we've abandoned our faith in Christ. It's when we think that our faith in Christ is not enough.
[00:16:43] And we need some other ideology, some other source of power, some other control in our lives, some other pleasure, some other whatever it may be, to give us security and a sense of identity. And we bring that into our worship and we say, look how compatible these things can be.
[00:16:59] And the call to people who worship God, going all the way back to Moses until today, is that we not mix our worship of Jesus and lesser gods.
[00:17:11] And everywhere I look, people would pitch to you that their ideology is the most compatible with your christian faith.
[00:17:20] And it is a seductive, alluring thought that we can get all the power of worldly systems alongside our faith in Jesus. Wouldn't that make us unstoppable? And I'll tell you, at the very best it's Aaron saying, here's your golden calf that's going to save you now let's worship Jesus together. And they don't work.
[00:17:40] They don't.
[00:17:43] And so what do we do with that? I don't know about you, but if I'm being honest, my heart and my allegiances are often torn.
[00:17:52] I often feel like I'm honestly worshiping Jesus. And yet other things also have my heart.
[00:18:00] What do we do with this?
[00:18:03] Here's what Moses did when he came off the mountain, and I don't recommend this, he got very angry.
[00:18:11] He destroyed the ten commandment tablets.
[00:18:14] He ground the tablets into powder, put them in water, made the people drink them, and then this is really dark. He commanded the killing of 3000 people in response to the disobedience.
[00:18:28] Not a great application for today's message. Okay, when you hear people say, I'm going to go Old Testament, that's what they're talking about. This kind of crazy, right?
[00:18:42] So there's immediate punishment that Moses carries out because of disobedience. But then I think what's maybe even more sobering than what is very intense punishment is what happens and is outlined in Exodus 33, seven and eight says, now, Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp. And wherever Moses, whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise up and each would stand at the tent door and watch Moses until he had gone into the tent.
[00:19:16] This is maybe the most sobering, large scale repercussion of the people's idolatry. And they, as they tried to mix their familiar worship of idols with their worship of Yahweh, is that after this happens, the tent where God's presence would commune and meet with the people, which was designed to be at the very center of their camp. It was designed to be in the middle, the center, right. One of our core values here is Jesus at the center.
[00:19:46] That's where God's presence should be. That's where we should experience God in communities, at the very center of everything we do. And because of this, Moses says he can't be in the middle of the people.
[00:19:57] And so it goes far off from the camp, where the people would stand in their own tents and they'd watch at a distance as God would be over there.
[00:20:08] The presence couldn't exist with this idolatrous people.
[00:20:16] And as I said, you go through the story of the Old Testament and book after book, especially the prophets.
[00:20:22] The prophets are preaching against idolatry and saying, just, you need to worship and only worship God.
[00:20:28] Your allegiance need to be to him only. And some of these prophets would just get killed because wicked kings would be like, I don't want to hear that anymore.
[00:20:37] And then others, they didn't get killed, but then they would go to God and be like, I am so over this preaching against idolatry thing, because they weren't listening.
[00:20:45] And so we see that for all the Old Testament, the people are getting it wrong and they're turning back to idols. And turning back to idols and turning back to idols. And according to the way that Exodus lays it out, that means that God would have had to stay at a distance from his people for all time, except that we get to the gospels, and in John chapter one, after all this time, from Moses to the New Testament, where God has been in this heartbreaking battle with his people to turn away from idols and God's had to be at a distance, and over and over again, the people continue to disobey and refuse to go into a place where all their worship belongs to God. Finally, we get to the gospels, and in John chapter one, John talking about his friend Jesus, who he believed to be in very nature, God, the flesh and blood incarnation of the God that was at Sinai, the God of the burning bush, he says he became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.
[00:21:50] This was a throwback to Exodus 33. All of John's listeners and readers would have understood that God becoming flesh and blood and moving back to the center of the camp carried incredible redemptive purpose, because they knew what their idolatry over the centuries had brought them. And here becomes God in flesh and blood. Moving back into the neighborhood, we saw the glory with our own eyes, the one of a kind glory. Like father, like son, son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.
[00:22:26] And I am so grateful today that when my affections that are often split, when my allegiance, which is often torn, when that has carried me to a place where I feel like God should be very distant, that in Jesus we have someone who is not satisfied to stay far off from us, but instead move right into our neighborhood that came close to us in the middle of our idolatrous worship, right? That came to us right in the middle of our allegiance being torn. Came right to us, right when we were worshiping Jesus, but also worshiping other things. And he moved right into the center of us. And he said, now, come to me if you're weary and heavy laden, and I'm going to give you rest. Walk with me, and we're going to learn how to worship in spirit and in truth.
[00:23:13] And I can think of no more to the point moment in the ministry of Jesus in John, chapter four, where Jesus has encountered this woman at a well, and she's a samaritan woman, and she's on the outside of the faith, and she is considered unclean and unacceptable to jewish rabbis like Jesus. And yet here he is standing next to her, and they begin to talk, and they begin to talk about worship.
[00:23:43] And she has all these questions like, well, do we have to go over there to worship? Or over here? Is the God of Israel confined to one place or another? And Jesus reiterates the heart of a God who is not contained to one place. He says, there is a time that is coming when you're not going to worship God over there or over there or over there. You're not going to need special rituals or certain places or certain sacred rites. But everywhere you're gonna have access to worship God in spirit and in truth. And that's the way that God wants to be worshiped, with whole hearts given to him. And that sounds all beautiful and poetic and nice, but you have to understand, he is talking to someone that everyone, even his disciples around him, are like, why is he even speaking to her?
[00:24:34] And he opens up his hand and he says, this is for you.
[00:24:38] This is for you who feel far away from God. This is for you who have been battling addiction and losing. This is for you who have tried to blend your allegiance to other things and other people and other ideologies with your worship of Jesus. This is for you that today you have the opportunity to once again commit your worship and your allegiance fully to Jesus. Again.
[00:25:04] There's a power in this.
[00:25:08] And so when it comes to the things that we need and we love. And, Evan, are you saying that, you know, we can't love anything else? We can't love our families, we can't go to Costco. We can't vote for certain parties or certain people? No, you can do all that. A friend of ours, Josh Butler, says this. Those things can have your lean, but they don't get your bow.
[00:25:30] Does that make sense? That we can. We can have opinions and we can. We can have discussions and we can support things and we can love things. We can love our country, but we can't worship it.
[00:25:42] Those things don't get our bow, because our bow, our allegiance, our worship is reserved for the king above all kings. Come on, now. And that's the posture in election year and not an election year, when the whole world has gone crazy, when the whole world seems all right, when wars are breaking out and in peacetime. Come on. We don't just. We don't just shape up when things go wrong. All of our lives we spend in worship and allegiance to Jesus. Amen.
[00:26:12] So I want you to, if you would pray with me, we're gonna just spend a moment as we head into communion, just in worship before the Lord. I think a lot of times we associate worship specifically with the act of singing, which it is. But it's so much more than that.
[00:26:28] Our worship is an expression of our allegiance and in the ways that our allegiance has been mixed or shifted, I just want to take a moment to repent of that as a community and as individuals, where we have placed our hope in the future and for the future, in lesser things, where we've looked to things other than Jesus for a sense of security or identity.
[00:27:00] Today we repent of that.
[00:27:03] And we would say as a community, as a church, that Jesus, today, you can have our whole worship. You can have our whole heart, tear down the idols around us, tear down those things that have got our affection and all of our attention and refocus our hearts on you.
[00:27:28] And, Lord, today I want to pray, especially for those battling addiction.
[00:27:35] Lord God, I just pray for just the Holy Spirit to come upon those who are battling, who maybe have even given up the fight that today that you would spur on and stir up a desire to once again go before you and to continue in the fight for freedom against any substance, against any thing that has become a compulsion. Lord, we pray for freedom in the name of Jesus. We pray that this would start a path even today towards health and wholeness and recovery. In Jesus name. In Jesus name.
